A “Screaming Shuddering Spine-chilling TEN horror classics by the great masters of suspense” no less, including three stories (*) which didn’t make it into the later, much expanded hardback (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973). Groovy graveyard cover artwork too!

“Out of the darkness sprang a huge, cloaked figure. In an instant the man had thrown aside his cloak, revealing a hideous and frightful appearance. Blue and white flames shot from his mouth, and his eyes appeared like balls of fire. The young girl who witnessed all this was so terrified that she fainted right away.”
This is just one of dozens of contemporary reports of the bizarre criminal who for over sixty years held the British population in a grip of fear. A man known only as “SPRING HEELED JACK”.

During the period of his reign of terror, this frightening, agile figure who attacked unwary travellers and pounced on terrified girls and women – and may have been responsible for several murders – attracted as many headlines and alarmed the authorities as much as his later mysterious compatriot in crime, Jack the Ripper.

From the late 1830’s he confounded the police, outwitted all attempts by the Army to catch him, and even boldly confronted law officers -slapping them across the face with his `ice cold hands’ before disappearing into the darkness with his eerie laugh ringing behind him….
Today, though, while Jack the Ripper is the subject of book after book, “SPRING HEELED JACK” has become just a name associated with anyone who jumps well. His real story is unknown. This is the first book to examine the legend in detail and throw new light on who the man behind the mask might have been.

Peter Haining’s fascinating study not only examines the reports of his activities – and suggests that more than one person adopted the disguise, including a famous nobleman -but discusses his fame as a star bf Victorian melodrama, and considers some of the strange theories that have been advanced about him -including one that he was really a spaceman!

The book is fully illustrated with remarkable engravings and photographs and includes a special section from one of the famous “Penny Dreadful” serials which featured the legend of the extraordinary “SPRING HEELED JACK”.

Groan. Another personal ‘one that got away’. I use to see this around fairly often, remaindered or discounted or something. Never snapped it up, because I thought it was merely a repackaging of his earlier The Mystery & Horrible Murders Of Sweeney Todd (Muller 1979). Just goes to show how wrong you can be!

Haining certainly revisits the earlier book (and his introduction to the Frederick Hazleton novel), but this time he takes it that step further as, utilizing fact, “fact”, centuries old remembered conversations and “it was rumoured at the time”s, he not only “proves” that Sweeney Todd exists, but also gives us a cradle-to-scaffold biography! How comes nobody else has consulted The Newgate Calendar for references to the meat-pie martyr and, if they did, what’s their excuse for finding zero mention of him contained in it’s grisly pages? Why have i had to wait until now to learn that Sweeney was a local lad, born in Brick Lane?

It’s research, Jim, but not as we know it. Outrageous. But in a totally brilliant way.

This time, rather fittingly, the dedication runs “To the memory of Tod Slaughter. I’m polishing ’em off well tonight!”

The story of the murder in the Red Barn is without doubt one of the most famous melodramas in the world.

The killing of the village beauty Maria Marten by the young squire William Corder in the charming, almost isolated village of Polstead in Suffolk May 1827 has become a legend over the past one hundred and fifty years, familiar to countless thousands of people.

Peter Haining has now, however, researched history and come up with some surprising new facts. Maria was just not the virtuous village beauty callously seduced and then murdered when she had served her purpose; nor was William Corder, her lover, the black-hearted local squire bent on debauchery and crime. Such simplifica­tions have come about for several reasons, yet notwithstanding the real facts, Maria and Corder are now regarded – wherever the tale is told – as the archetypal demure, cruelly-wronged maiden and mustachioed, unscrupulous Squire of melodrama. Indeed, many differing dramatisations take them as their models; and not a few of these plays are unashamedly based on what their authors imagined had happened under the decaying roof of the Red Barn. The facts, in this new assessment of the murder, make rather different, and perhaps even more fascinating, reading.

What the author has set out to do is to show how a basically unpleasant village killing became the crime of the last century. The facts present an amazing and melodramatic story of buried passions….

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, has become legendary throughout the world. The macabre story of his luring unsuspecting customers into his shop, slitting their throats and then having his partner in crime – a pastrycook named Mrs Lovett – turn the corpses into meat pies has been a favourite melodrama for more than a century.
Yet for all Sweeney Todd’s notoriety the mystery as to whether or not he really existed has remained unresolved. Here, Peter Haining does much to prove that Sweeney Todd did exist, and did indeed own a barber’s shop in Fleet Street. He also presents the original nineteenth-century novel by Frederick Hazleton, which will delight not only believers in the Sweeney Todd saga but those avid readers and collectors of the Victorian Penny Dreadful. The contemporary illustrations add to the relish.

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is a figure famous around the world. A sinister hairdresser who is said to have disposed of his unsuspecting customers through a revolving chair, and having robbed and murdered them, handed over their corpses to his partner in crime to make into meat pies, he has few peers in the annals of crime – or British history for that matter.

Yet this extraordinary character whose name has been familiar to young and old alike since the middle of the Nineteenth Century, is shrouded in mystery:

Was he a real person who actually murdered a hundred and more victims – or just a figment of a writer’s brilliant imagination?

Why is it that although plays featuring his dark deeds have become among the most popular and enduring of any in the history of the theatre, the novel which gave him literary life has been unheard of for a century and a quarter?

And, perhaps most surprisingly of all in view of this notoriety, why has no full length study of the Demon Barber been attempted before now?

These were just some of the questions that had fascinated Peter Haining since his years as a journalist in Fleet Street, and which he finally set out to try and answer in this remarkable book. And not only has he succeeded in coming up with some surprising evidence about Sweeney Todd, but has studied the illusive book which made him famous, and made extensive use of this work. He also looks at the background to the legend, its subsequent enormous success in the entertainment media, and continued growth to the present day. Indeed he discusses all the elements that have gone towards making this such an intriguing story – and even gives space to a variety of theories about the Demon Barber -including one idea that he might actually have been a woman!

At long last, this book throws a revealing light or a figure as famous in London lore as Dick Whittington and Jack the Ripper

The throat-slasher of St. Dunstans seems to have held a lasting fascination for Haining, who also published the long forgotten Frederick Hazleton penny dreadful, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, with a fine introduction by himself for W. H. Allen in 1980. His Sweeney Todd: The Real Story Of The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (Robson, 1998), is a reworking of the earlier books and sets out to “prove” that, not only was there some substance to the macabre story, but that Todd actually existed. It bears a dedication “To W.O.G. Lofts who helped to spring man of the traps”

Dracula Lives!
An Amazing Story of Resurrection
The Birth of the Legend
The Bloodthirsty Parents of Dracula
Dracula by Day—and Other Misconceptions
The Count Who Won’t Lie Down
Playing the Master of the Undead
Tales of the Vampire Hunter
‘The Bloofer Ladies’
The Wurdalak Who Might Have Been Dracula

Blurb
One hundred years ago in the autumn of 1887, the most famous vampire of them all, Count Dracula, stalked from his castle in Transylvania to the streets of London. and started a legend that has endured and grown to epic proportions.

This book is published to celebrate not only that momentous event, but a number of other Dracula-related anniversaries also. It is seventy-five years since the death of Dracula’s brilliant creator, Bram Stoker, and ninety years since the publication of the original novel: 1987 also marks the centenary of the birth of Boris Karloff, the film star whose name is so closely associated with the vampire legend on the screen.

Dracula has become a twentieth century myth, extending his influence into all branches of the media. Stoker’s novel has never been out of print and has only been outsold by the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare, but the story has also been adapted for the cinema, dramatised for the stage, radio and television. and spawned a whole series of books and films on the Dracula theme — not to mention a worldwide fascination with the subject of vampirism.

Profusely illustrated with photographs and prints, many of which have never before appeared in book form, The Dracula Centenary Book explores this extraordinary success story, drawing on much previously unpublished material. Following the recent discovery of the original manuscript of the novel, packed away and forgotten on a Pennsylvanian farm, and from studying the author’s working papers held in the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, it is now possible to discover exactly how Bram Stoker developed and researched his book. The story of the growth of the screen cult is equally fascinating: the author includes interviews with the stars who have appeared in the major film versions over the past fifty years and a detailed listing of the films themselves.

There is also a chronology of famous real-life cases of vampirism from around the world.

Peter Haining is a recognised authority on supernatural literature and horror films. His enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge combine to make a book that is unputdownable.

PETER HAINING has been an avid student of horror, fantasy and the supernatural since boyhood, and has published many books on the subject, which have not only been widely successful but have made a valuable contribution to the literature on the genre. With his wife and three children, he lives in East Anglia